If you have your files in a cloud solution like Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, IBM Connections or Google Drive, you can connect Windows Explorer directly to these services. By doing this, you get direct access to your files from your Explorer window, as if they were stored locally on your computer. You can even access them while offline. Here are all the services I’m connected to:

PS: You can click on any of these images to see them in large versions if you want to see a more detailed view!

If I’m composing a new email in my web browser, like in Office 365, Gmail or IBM Verse, I can easily just take a file from any of these services, and drag them straight from Windows Explorer and into the email. Here I’m dragging a Dropbox file over as an attachment into a new email I’m composing in IBM Verse:

This works just as well in Gmail, Office 365 and most other web based mail services.

However, if I try to do this with a file in IBM Connections, it doesn’t work:

Someone asked me about this a couple of weeks back, and I told him how you can get around this. Yes, you can drag and drop files in IBM Connections from Windows Explorer and straight into the email. To be able to do this, you must add the file to My Drive in Connections. Here’s how you do this:

Find the IBM Connections file under My Files in Windows Explorer:

Right click on it and choose Add to My Drive:

A window showing you the synchronisation will pop up and then you will be told that the file has been added to My Drive. Click OK.

Find My Drive in the left side menu of Explorer:

Find the file you just synced and simply drag it over to the email, and everything will work just fine:

So you can achieve the same functionality with IBM Connections files, just as you can do with files from other cloud based services.

Note: Mac users will always be able to drag and drop directly into web based email services because they have to add their files to My Drive in order to be able to access them at all.

I’ve worked with IBM Notes/Domino (formerly known as Lotus Notes/Domino) since 1997. In those years, the death of Notes/Domino has been predicted so many times. But it hasn’t happened yet.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it could have been at better health than it has been for years.

But as I’ve written several times in this blog, a new initiative has been started, lead by HCL taking over the development of the platform. And they’ve got hundreds of people working on it.

In the past weeks I’ve been part of a group of people who have given input on the design of the user interface for IBM Notes v11, which most likely will appear next autumn. And it looks very promising.

However, there are plenty of new stuff coming for Domino v10 as well. I’ve summed that up in this blog posting. Check it out for all the goodies.

If you need need an expert on IBM Notes/Domino. Or if you want to know anything about the future of Notes/Domino v10 that is out in October. Or if you need a skilled Notes/Domino developer. Or if you need help with your licensing. Or maybe you want to webify your notes applications and make them available on cell phones and pads? Or do you simply want to make your native Notes applications look more modern and sexy?

How do people find you on Facebook?
People can usually find you by searching for you, or maybe even Facebook suggests you as a friend for others. But you can exercise some control over this. In the left menu in Settings, go to Privacy and find the section called How People Find and Contact You:
Here you can set who should be able to send you a friend request, if external search engines should be able to find you on Facebooks and how people can search and find you.

Control who sees what on your timeline and who sees your tags?
You can also control who should see what you post, and you can even control who should see postings you are tagged in. Go to Timeline and Tagging the left menu under Settings. There you will find all these settings:

Block anything you want
Go to Blocking in the left side menu of Settings. You will now get a screen where you can do the following:
– Put people on a Restricted list, which means you can keep people as friends, but hide all postings from them that you share with friends only
– Block users, which means they are unfriended, can’t search for you, contact you, send you messages or see your profile
– Block messages, you can stop users from sending you messages on Messenger. However, they will still be able to post on your profile, if you are friends
– Block app invites, you can add friends who keeps sending you invites to apps to a list here
– Block event invites, you can add friends you don’t want event invites from here
– Block apps, here is where you add nametests.com and all other apps (let’s face it, all those apps are annoying)
– Block pages, yup, you can even block entire Facebook pages

Which language do you want?
Go to Language in the left side menu of Settings. Here you can set the following:
– What language should your Facebook be in
– What language do you want postings in other languages to automatically be translated to and which languages you don’t want to translate
– Set your postings to be posted in several languages at once

What should you be notified about?
Yes, Facebook keeps coming up with new ways to annoy you with notifications. However, you can turn these on and off as you please via the Notifications menu in the left side menu of Settings:
– On Facebook: here you can set in detail what sort of notifications that should pop up under the notification bell on Facebook. Do yourself a favour and go through this!
– Email: Turn on and off what notifications you want to receive emails from Facebook about
– Desktop and Mobile: Here you can control all the pop ups, buzzing and beeps you can get from Facebook, both on your cell phone and on your computer
– Text message: Turn on and off what sort of text messages Facebook can send to your cell phone.

What can the public see?
Under Public Posts in the left side menu of Settings you can control who can follow your public posts (you can be followed by people who aren’t friends, unless you turn this off), comment on them, who can like or comment on public photos or profile info, if you want to have rankings on comments, your public Facebook name and if you want to connect a Twitter account to your Facebook (this means your postings will be posted on Twitter, with a link to your Facebook post).

What does your Facebook profile look like?
Have you ever wondered what your Facebook profile looks like to other people? Facebook has a really neat way to let you do this. Go to Public Posts in the left side menu of the Settings page:
At the bottom there is a link called Want to know what followers can see? View your public timeline:Click on this. Your profile will now open up, and you will be able to see how your profile looks for people who are not in your friends list:
At the top of your profile, above your Facebook profile photo you see this:Click on this. A search field will now appear and you can search for any of your friends. Click on the name of the person you want to check and you will now see your profile just like that person will see it.